Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

  “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” Walker said but his hand did not come off the doorknob. “I really don’t care what you do or how long you live.”

  “You’re a cheap informant, Peter,” Calabrese said. “Mostly that information of yours stinks. I think that you’re three quarters of a cop at heart anyway, maybe even a double agent.”

  “That’s bullshit. It’s just not so.”

  “But mostly,” Calabrese went on in a slow, patient tone, “I’ve been getting bored with you recently. You’re not doing me any good alive, anyway. Maybe it would be interesting to see you dead.

  Walker shook his head again. “I’m leaving.”

  “You want to leave. You keep on saying that. But you’re not moving, are you, because you know that I’d probably shoot you.”

  “This Wulff has gotten to you. Maybe it’s contagious, whatever he’s got. Whatever the hell it is I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Don’t you?” Calabrese asked softly. “Don’t you want to cut in on it?”

  “No,” Walker said, “no,” and as if fighting himself up and over some level of attention, gasped, inhaled irregularly and then fell against the door, struggling with the doorknob. His motions were irregular, he did not seem quite able to coordinate but finally, in a spasm, he did. He seized the glistening knob and turned it, opening a thin sliver of light into the empty hallway.

  Calabrese smiled in a private way.

  He shot the man in the back of the neck.

  Walker staggered in reverse—two steps, three—in a posture of astonishment, reaching a hand toward the wounded area as if he were dabbing tentatively at a sneeze, as if the wound were in the front rather than the back. He half-turned, showing Calabrese profile, his eyes rolling and then tried to say something, something which no doubt was profound and would have addressed the heart of the issue in a basic way (Calabrese had always wished that he could speak to a dead man) but the sounds only came out like those of a frog. Sounding like a frog seemed to amaze Walker. He reached his other hand toward the area, gripped the back of his neck as if trying to seat his head into place. He twisted. He turned, looked at Calabrese fully, trying to hold his head on his shoulders.

  Calabrese shot him in the forehead.

  Walker squeaked. He leaped, danced two dance steps and then, like a man making himself a careful bed in the woods, knelt, patted the floor twice and then lay in the spot that he had made. Lying on the rug he kicked once as if descending into sleep, then lay quiet. Blood moved cautiously away from him in bright, red rivulets.

  Calabrese, sighing, put the gun away, looked at the corpse for a moment and picked up the intercom. Killing a cop, even this cop, was supposed to be a bad business—even for Calabrese—but he figured that this was not the major problem; he could always get around it. What he could not get around so easily was the loss of control which the murder had betrayed. But then you could not, he supposed, have everything. Better to discharge one’s feelings than to bottle them up; that was the secret to a long, healthy life. “Get a couple of people,” he said into the intercom. “I’ve got a goddamned accident on the rug here and I’d like to have it cleaned up.”

  “Yes,” the voice said and clicked off. The person on the other end had heard this before but not for a while. Probably, Calabrese thought, they’ll be thinking that it’s like old times around here. It isn’t, not quite—but there were certain purgative effects in blood. They could not be discarded. Always, no matter how far you got away from it, you might have to come back to the blood eventually just to retrace your origins. It was what made you strong.

  Calabrese leaned back, broke another cigarette, looked impassively at the man on the floor. Was Walker right, he wondered. It was important in his position to hear all angles and discard none of them; a lot of people in similar positions had gotten into trouble eventually because they had not kept open minds. Calabrese did not consider himself to be in that class; nevertheless Walker might have brought something to his attention that he had not acknowledged. Maybe if he had shot Wulff he could have saved himself some difficulties. He did not think so, he thought he had the man under the tightest wraps possible and he believed that he could get rid of him with a simple phone call anyway … but still, you did not know. You simply did not know.

  Wulff was an unknown element in the tight equation of the operation. Surely Walker had had a point. It had been stupid to leave the man alive. Hadn’t it? Calabrese leaned back in the chair, realized that he was humming unconsciously in a cracked old man’s quaver. Getting old. He cut it out.

  On the other hand, he thought, sooner or later, at some stage of this game, a man had to allow a variable into the equation of himself. He had to do it if only to convince himself that he was still alive. It had been too easy for Calabrese for too long; he still had to know if he could meet a challenge if one erupted.

  Bullshit. Walker was right. He had had no business letting the fool walk away from him, under any kind of custody. Instead of leaving Walker for dead on this carpet he should have made it Wulff. All that he had done with this poor bastard of a rogue cop on the floor was to transfer the desire, the change of heart. Admit it. Admit it, Calabrese.

  He heard sounds in the hallway; two men came through the door without knocking on it. Calabrese looked at them with rage. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he said.

  Looking between the corpse and Calabrese one of them said, “You called—”

  “I called, I didn’t call,” Calabrese said. “Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here right now.”

  The door closed, the two men were gone. Scared shitless. Yes, he could still scare the shit out of them. He could do it to anyone. He was in command here and it was time to deal with Wulff. He had been a fool to let it go to this point.

  Calabrese picked up the phone and looking at the corpse in a detached way got an outside line, got the operator, and asked to put through a person-to-person call, international, to Lima, Peru.

  II

  Half an hour before his interview with the hotel owner, three days after he had been dumped in the hotel, Wulff had walked into his room on the sixteenth floor of the Crillon, fresh from the coffee shop where he had spent an hour looking at tourists and wondering which of them was keeping him under observation that shift. He hated them. He hated the tourists. He hated the Crillon and Peru; it was better, maybe, than the alternative Calabrese had offered him, which was death, but not by so much that you wouldn’t think of it long and hard if you were offered the time to make a careful choice. Dead city, dead country: dead hotel, steel and glass smacked into the middle of it, the tourists curiously internationalized, no one set of characteristics which would define most of them as being from a particular place, all of it blending into the heat, the dust, the very odor of the Incan ruins which Wulff felt that he could smell lofting from Cuzco miles to the north. Something was very wrong in this country; it was even rottener than Havana but it was not a definable rottenness either, nothing that you could quite nail down. It had to do with the fact that this hotel did not belong with the landscape, that the landscape itself was shockingly out of order—old and new jammed up against one another, the ruins behind all of it. He did not want to think of it. The more he thought of it the worse it looked.

  It stunk but that was only the beginning of the trouble here. He was an insect in screens; he could not get out. He could wander out of the hotel, he could test all of the spaces of the hotel itself but the observation was so close that he felt he could almost see Calabrese himself here, let alone his men. They had him under the closest guard; there had to be ten or fifteen of them working in shifts, tracking him. Sooner or later the word would come from Calabrese to dispose of him and what could he do then? He might be able to take one or more of them face to face, but it would come in a different way. And then too the madness and cunning of Calabrese was that Wulff would never know when the time was coming. They could get him anytime or they could leave him to swelter
in these spaces for months.

  That was the hell of it, not being able to face the situation directly. But it was also, he supposed, what made Calabrese just about the best at what he was doing.

  So it was that half an hour before his interview with the hotel owner and three days after he had been dumped in the hotel, Wulff had walked into his room on the sixteenth floor of the Crillon and found a man with a gun sitting in the chair nearer the door, looking at him with the kind of low-key interest which Wulff had not seen since he left the States.

  “Just hold it right there,” the man with the gun said as if he were an usher working a motion-picture line. “Don’t move please and we’ll be perfect.” He looked as if he had been waiting for a long time, but as if the waiting had meant no more to him than the confrontation did now. Peyote? Wulff thought. As far as he knew, they worked peyote down here like it was chewing gum. But that was no drug-glaze in the man’s eyes.

  “Check him out,” the man said to someone.

  Wulff’s gaze swung. He saw another man come from the bathroom, walk toward him briskly, giving little nods and waves as if he were a politician walking the last mile. Maybe he was. Maybe he, Wulff, was trapped into some kind of insane campaign and these two were simply using him to impress one another. The chemistry of the looks between them said something—that they were slightly nervous but each was drawing force from the presence of the other. Good psychology; that was why you worked in pairs, even for the easiest kind of jobs. It took an unusual man like Wulff to carry off things alone.

  The second man looked just as short and efficient as the first. Definitely he was an American; they both were. Wulff could not tell the identities of the tourists in this international city, this city which with too much history had simply decided to take on no more, but he could tell these. These were Chicago—Midwest. Calabrese’s men? Well, Wulff thought, that was it then. If so, it was a relief. At last, no matter what happened, he was facing the end of waiting.

  He held himself still, said nothing. It had been coming, now it was almost over. Still, the presence of the men was a shock. Anything, no matter how long-anticipated, was always a shock when it came. Like death. He had to applaud Calabrese’s methods though. The man was a master. He knew just what the hell he was doing.

  The second man came around him cautiously, sniffing at him like a dog, seemingly drawing strength from these breaths, then extended his hands. Very delicately he frisked Wulff. The frisk was not completely professional, but then it did not really have to be. Wulff was carrying nothing. They sure as hell had stripped him before he got out of Chicago and only a fool would have tried to arm himself in this kind of situation. It would have been death city: roaming through Lima, looking for a replacement tool. What he had done in those three days had been simply to track what they had in mind for him, establish some kind of routine which they could not break.

  Now they had come into his room. What did that prove? It proved, among many other things, that he was in a situation where he could not protect himself.

  The frisker shook his head and backed away quickly then, seeming grateful to get away. He was still breathing in shallow, rapid gulps. Interesting. “He’s clean,” the man said. “He’s got nothing.”

  “That’s good,” the first man said. “That’s very good; I appreciate that.” He stood, moved over to the bed, sat on the bed convulsively. Then he faced Wulff still holding the gun in that loose but alert way. “Tell me all about yourself,” he said.

  “Soon,” Wulff said. That kind of shit did not throw him off balance; it was standard interrogation technique. If you had ever been in or around the force you saw it pulled all the time;. the man would either attempt to kill him or he would not attempt to do it. This kind of dialogue meant nothing, was just an attempt to fill space … and it was the interrogator’s decision to wait this out, not his so he did not have to say a thing. Instead, he looked through the windows past the partially drawn shades to see the outline of the Andes, the sun glinting off them in a peculiarly off-angle way. Picturesque country. Very picturesque indeed, Peru: it was probably all of the corpses piled here through the centuries that gave the land its tint of energy, its terrible lushness. The Crillon obliterated scenery rather than worked with it, but that was modern-day technology for you. Not that he could object. Hotels like the Crillon were for people who did not want to see the country they were seeing but wanted to carry their own impressions around with them. Screw it. It was rotten anyway, all of it.

  “I’ve got nothing to say,” he said after a while and held his position.

  The second man coughed into his hand, reached into his coat almost absently and took out a gun of his own which he pointed at Wulff. “I think you’d better talk,” he said. “Come on.”

  Like the other, the tone here was flat, uninflected. Calabrese’s men. They had to be; it was the flatlands he heard. But then, Wulff thought, his mind suddenly scrambling away from what he heard, it just did not make any sense. It did not fall into place at all: Calabrese could have had him killed in Chicago. What kind of man would exile him these thousands of miles just to shoot him in a hotel room? It was too expensive and Calabrese, like any administrator, knew how to control funds. He might be perverse but never profligate … unless there had been a change in the situation back there and Calabrese had decided it was time to pull the plug. That was a possibility.

  “I don’t want to talk,” Wulff said. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “You’ve said that already,” the first man said without humor. He turned the gun on himself like a man investigating suicide, leaned forward, looked into the tube of the barrel as if it were a vagina. As he peered into the empty space, one eye concealed, a horrid optical illusion made it seem to Wulff as though the man were winking at him.

  “You know,” the man said, still looking into the barrel, “I’m tired of you Wulff. I’ve heard a lot about you—your reputation has gotten around and I’m getting sick of the whole deal. It’s always the same fucking stuff except that you were starting to get really dangerous up there. You thought you were making a difference.” He withdrew the gun, turned it on Wulff and then, as if changing his mind shook his head and gestured toward the other one. “You take him,” he said.

  “Me? I don’t want to fucking take him. You’re the one doesn’t like him. You have the pleasure.”

  “Fuck you,” the man said. “I told you to take him and you’d better do it right now. You hear me?”

  The second man heard. Sighing he stood, drew his gun and leveled it at Wulff. His gestures were not quite as professional as the other man’s but he seemed to know what he was doing. The hand in the action of drawing was almost detached from wrist and shoulder as though someone else were really doing this. The implication seemed to be: Don’t bother me; take it up with the other one. “All right,” he said, “but you’re the one has the quarrel with him; you ought to do it. I don’t give a shit either way.”

  Wulff watched what happened then in a state of careful detachment, a detachment which could not have lasted more than seconds but was sufficient in his extension of concentration to seem much longer—it was as if he were putting a tentacle into the room. One’s concentration under stress was always sufficient to the situation if you knew what the hell you were doing.

  The second man, then, extended his gun still in that absentminded, sleepy way, the gun coming out of his hand like a deformed finger. Then as his forehead furrowed into concentration, as his eyes, concentrating on the gun in his hand as if he were seeing it for the first time, narrowed with purpose it became clear to Wulff that the man was about to administer a killing shot. One’s death always afflicts a man with unreality—there was that moment of failing comprehension, of nonacceptance. But it was not going to happen to Wulff, because they had killed him in a different way, but just as thoroughly, months ago. His death was as real to him as a lover’s body. He knew what was happening. It was no bluff, they were not faking. It was real an
d it was happening in this world.

  The gun came forward.

  What he did then he was able to do with no thought at all. Thought had nothing to do with it. The distance between himself and the man on the bed was not great: either through lapsed calculation or by design Wulff had been left in reach of this one. If the man had had any sense at all he would have used the gun as a lever to prod himself away, but it had just not occurred to him that Wulff could close the distance. And without even thinking about it Wulff had. Unconscious. Everything was unconscious.

  Wulff kicked out with his left leg. This slightly unbalanced him but nothing crucial to his maneuver; with one low diving kick, pivoting to hold himself he knocked the gun with his heel cleanly out of the man’s hand, seeing it as if in a glaze spin across the room. It hit the wall broadside, thumped on it, then clanged to the bare portion of the floor and bounced to the rug. The man who had been about to shoot him reacted with disbelief to this, put his hands to knees in reflex, making a motion as if to rise. Then as if the implications of the situation had come to him for the first time he looked at the other man. “Shoot!” he screamed. “Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  His voice was high, the voice of someone much younger and in a situation altogether different. Wulff was caught by it but the other man was not. He showed no inclination whatsoever to fire, seemed to be deaf as a matter of fact; he held his gun on Wulff in a relaxed way, not nearly achieving that funnel of concentration which, at least for the other man, was the killing point. They did not find death easy to administer. “Shoot him!” the man without the gun was still shouting, “you’ve got to shoot him now!” But the man on the bed shifted in a sudden glaze of inattention, moved away, holding himself up on the bed like a girl frightened by a mouse, all of his limbs like tentacles retracting. He said nothing. It’s yours to handle read the message. “You dirty bastard,” the unarmed man said as if with a sense of discovery. “You yellow bastard, what have you done to me?”